Kenya’s ‘Goons’, Necropolitics and the Ghosts of  Kill Me Quick (Mwangi, 1973)

Kenya’s postcolonial project is rotting at the seams, and the youth are profusely bleeding from its wounds. In many ways, what the writer Meja Mwangi likely intended as a fictional piece in the early 1970s has since hardened into prophecy. His book, Kill Me Quick, reads today like truth carved into the bones of a hardened nation. His protagonists, Meja and Maina, have become blueprints for a post-independence generation cast into the margins by a system quick to forget its promises. In the novel, they migrate to Nairobi in pursuit of opportunity, only to encounter systemic exclusion and eventual criminalization.¹

Today, their ghosts haunt the streets of Nairobi. They are weaponized as “protest goons” during periods of civil unrest and discarded without names. Their journey from rural hope to urban despair emulates the lived reality of many Kenyan youths, especially those from informal settlements, where exclusion is so routine it has become structural. As these young people navigate poverty, police brutality and political exploitation, it becomes a pertinent question, ‘What kind of sovereignty feeds on its future, only to bury it in silence?’

Through Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, which describes the power of the state to decide who may live and who must die, we begin to make sense of this political theatre. ² It is not simply about bullets, it is also about abandonment. It morphs into the slow, invisible deaths inflicted by unemployment, broken schools, dry taps, hunger and the criminalization of survival. These are lives permitted only on the edge of usefulness, until they are erased.

Mbembe’s necropolitics argues that the state does not simply fail to nurture life, nor does it merely neglect the margins. Rather, it curates death deliberately, using abandonment as a form of control. The slums are not overlooked; they are managed through calculated invisibility. These youths do not die because the system fails. They die because the system works exactly as intended, a system that selects who must perish in the margins so that the centre may remain undisturbed.

The literary depiction of structural marginalization in Kill Me Quick offers critical insight into this present-day reality. In Kenya’s protest economy, economically desperate youth are not seen as citizens to be empowered, but as bodies to be used and discarded. Mbembe’s concept of “death-worlds” captures this condition precisely. These are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the ‘living dead’. Survival is permitted, but only barely. As he puts it, 

“To kill or to let live…constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”

This concept is not confined to theory. The deployment of youth as protest goons and their subsequent abandonment is a grim expression of that sovereignty, revealing how power operates through the exposure of some lives to violence and death. This dynamic helps explain why some communities, like those in the slums of Kibera, Mathare and Mukuru, seem permanently frozen in suffering. Here, young people are raised in the shadows of opportunity, visible only when the state needs bodies, either for votes or violence.³

In these areas, infrastructure and essential government services are sparse and job opportunities are even rarer.⁴ This conditional visibility reveals a state that appears only to extract what it needs before retreating into absence, a reality exposed during public unrest, where these very communities become political battlegrounds for politicians to hire the unemployed as foot soldiers for chaos.⁵ 

Kill Me Quick paints Nairobi as a hostile environment, one that thrives on the exclusion of the poor. Meja and Maina’s repeated failure to secure jobs stems not from laziness or lack of education, but from a system designed to shut them out. Their descent into crime is framed as a rational outcome of a society that offers neither support nor second chances. This fictional journey parallels the grim reality facing today’s youth. Over 67 percent of unemployed Kenyans are in the youthful category (15-34yrs) ⁶ many of whom live in informal settlements where the future comes with a price tag they cannot afford, and where those in power boldly step in to take advantage of their desperation.

The logic of necropolitics also extends far beyond Kenya. In Gaza, life is policed by drones, walls and checkpoints, an architecture of surveillance designed not just to control, but to erase. “This is an effort to erase not only Palestinian life but the evidence of its existence,” observed one Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a distinguished British-Palestinian doctor and humanitarian.⁷ Here, sovereignty is exercised through siege and surveillance, with death and the threat of life woven into daily life. 

The same logic can be traced across Brazil, where Black youth living in favelas are routinely gunned down during heavily militarized police raids, often justified as anti-drug operations. These operations disproportionately target poor, Black neighborhoods, where young men are viewed as threats, many killed without warning, trial or investigation.⁸ The favelas become both battlegrounds and graveyards, where poverty is criminalized and Blackness becomes a mark of suspicion. In the United States, poor Black and Latino communities live under constant surveillance and incarceration.⁹ It has been reported that Black people have been incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of White people. Correspondingly, 35 percent of Latino and Asian adults have reported feeling targeted because of their race or ethnicity.¹⁰ 

These examples reveal a shared pattern of power across borders. In all these contexts, the state exercises power not through inclusion, but through abandonment, containment, and, when convenient, elimination.

As protests against police brutality swept the streets of Nairobi, political actors across the divide reportedly mobilized youth to fuel confrontation. The hired goons claimed to have been offered as little as Kshs.100 (Kenyan Shillings) for transport into Nairobi CBD to beat up protesters with sticks, throw stones and basically create chaos. For these young men, beating up protesters becomes a form of gig work and an informal job market where the risk is a body battered or limbs broken and the reward is barely enough for a plate of food.¹¹

“A white Fielder arrived and they gave us sticks”, lamented a youth who had just arrived from Kawangware.“They told us we would get something after we finished the job but nothing came,” said another in an interview by Citizen TV.“Our passing near City Hall was to show we had done the “job”, but we haven’t received the payment yet,” added a third. ¹²

Others waiting with them looked like they too felt the pinch of exploitation and regret, illustrating a cruel double betrayal; first by an economy that excludes them, and then by political elites who exploit their desperation. Like Meja and Maina, they too become not authors of the chaos, but instruments within it, footnotes in someone else’s campaign strategy; summoned when violence becomes useful, discarded when it becomes inconvenient.  Their visibility is brutally conditional, lasting only as long as their utility, as long as there are stones to be thrown or rival rallies to be disrupted. Once the job is done or the cameras are off, they disappear, into the waiting arms of mob justice,¹³ the back seats of police trucks, the silence of morgues, or the grinding return to hunger and hopelessness.

And as the actors change, the scenes shift. A monopoly on violence that does not restore order, but continues to write a script of repression. This was starkly evident during the recent protests following the death in police custody of blogger Albert Ojwang.¹⁴ As peaceful youth demonstrated against the young man’s death in police custody, hired goons vandalized property with impunity, police training their weapons on unarmed civilians and bystanders and the very act of existing in public space was treated as provocation.

This dynamic was tragically illustrated in the case of a 22-year-old vendor selling face masks. With his hands raised and no weapon in sight, he was shot at close range, mercilessly and in full view of cameras.¹⁵ A grim performance where the state seems to manufacture unrest through abandonment, weaponizes desperation through goons and then reasserts control through lethal authority.

In conclusion, Kill Me Quick raises ghosts that haunt the present, a mirror held up to Kenya’s postcolonial failures. The persistent presence of disenfranchised youth at the frontlines of violence becomes not just a law enforcement issue, but a policy failure, a development crisis and a moral collapse. Understanding this dynamic through both literature and necropolitical theory reveals that protest violence in Kenya is not a security anomaly, it is a systemic outcome. And fixing it will take more than bullets and barricades. It will require deep reforms; investment in education, job creation, youth empowerment and urban planning that centers dignity over containment.

Until then, the goons will walk in the frontlines, with empty pockets and lives priced for disposal. Their deaths will not be random, they will be scheduled, negotiated and televised. They will be mourned, briefly so, then forgotten, until the next riot calls them forth again.

Carolyn W. Gatonye is a tech professional, independent researcher and law student at Kabarak University, Kenya. Her work interrogates the intersections of law, literature and governance, with a particular interest in youth marginalisation, protest cultures and human rights. 

ENDNOTES

1. Meja Mwangi, Kill Me Quick (Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1973).
2. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
3. Arise Consortium, “Understanding Violence in The Slums: Resilience of Normalization?”,  https://www.ariseconsortium.org/violence-urban-youth-kenya/
4. Kibera UK, “Facts and Information”, https://www.kibera.org.uk/facts-info/
5. NTV Kenya, “Politicians Are Hiring Goons To Cause Chaos & Deter Kenyans from Protesting - Boniface Mwangi:”, https://www.youtube.com/live/pL5HQt-zzqQ at 10:30-11:05
6. Federation of Kenya Employers, “Youth Employment,” https://www.fke-kenya.org/policy-issues/youth-employment
7. Al Mayadeen English, “Gaza and the Logic of Necropolitics: Sovereignty Measured by Killing,” https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/gaza-and-the-logic-of-necropolitics--sovereignty-measured-by
8. Agência Brasil, “Black Movement Rises Against Police Violence Throughout Brazil,” https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/direitos-humanos/noticia/2023-08/black-movement-rises-against-police-violence-throughout-brazil
9. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, “How the Surveillance State Destroys the Lives of Poor Whites and People of Color,” https://knightcolumbia.org/content/how-surveillance-state-destroys-lives-poor-whites-and-people-color
10. NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), “Race And Justice”, https://naacp.org/issues/race-justice
11. Citizen TV Kenya, “Goons for Hire during Protests,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ0fEDuW_wU at 1:20-1:30
12. Citizen TV Kenya, “Goons for Hire during Protests,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ0fEDuW_wU at 3:34-3:40
13. Maisha TV Kenya, “Hired Goons’ Motorbike Torched, Goons Beaten in Epic Gen Z Protest Clash”,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXjccUNosPA
14. Citizen TV Kenya, “Albert Ojwang Assaulted to Death,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvZnb2Z67Fg
15. Daily Nation, “Boniface Kariuki: Family in Agony Over Mask Vendor Shot by Police, Abandoned by the State,”             https://nation.africa/kenya/news/boniface-kariuki-mask-vendor-shot-police-abandoned-state-5090422#story